I wrote earlier that President Obama has the kind of trust the previous administration could only dream of having. Looking at the two speeches delivered today by Obama and Dick Cheney, there’s a reason for that. Whereas the President expressed a wholly believable reluctance and caution, as well as an understanding that these priorities need to be balanced with the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution, Cheney simply spoke as though there was no conflict at all. Whereas Obama, at least rhetorically, recognizes a limit to the president’s authority, Cheney simply doesn’t believe there is such a thing as the president doing something illegal. The man even went as far as to continue to tie Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, a myth that is as debunked as flat earth theory and the idea that flies come from excrement.
He also issued this fascinating contradiction. First he mocked concerns about torture:
Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.
It’s really too bad General David Petraeus probably has too much class to respond to that directly.
Then, Cheney, after defending the right to strip prisoners naked, dump them in tiny boxes, waterboard them, beat them, and throw their heads against walls, got into a little phony moralizing of his own:
In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America’s cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.
I’d really like to hear Cheney’s rationale for why the things described in the report from the International Committee of the Red Cross are qualitatively different from what happened at Abu Ghraib. Especially since in one of the pictures from Abu Ghraib features a smiling Charles Graner posing over the corpse of detainee Manadel al-Jamadi, who died as a result of the “lawful, skillful” interrogation of a CIA officer who has never been revealed.
— A. Serwer
